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Transmedia: Entertainment reimagined

This article was taken from the August issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online

Esther Robinson got off the R train in Astoria, Queens, and started walking to the American Museum of the Moving Image. It was a warm July evening in 2007 and Robinson, then 37 years old and a filmmaker, had come with a friend to see a movie, Head Trauma. As they approached the cinema, she noticed that the payphones were ringing -- all four of them. "You forget payphones exist," recalls Robinson. "That was the first thing I noticed." She picked one up: all she could hear were fragments of a conversation, "sounds of madness". Outside the cinema, a preacher in short sleeves and a tie was raving, handing out apocalyptic comic books to passers-by. He pressed one into Robinson's hand as she hurried past, anxious to get to the film.

The opening credits prompted the audience to send in a text to a given number. As the film rolled, they started receiving "weird text messages"; phones were ringing.

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The film was about a drifter who inherits his mother's house and starts to lose his mind. The next day, back in Brooklyn, Robinson found the comic in her handbag. On the back was written: "Do you want to play a game?", along with an address, headtraumamovie.com. She typed it in to her computer. What she found was an online game that continued the story. "In the middle of it, the phone rang," she says. She recognised the voice. It was the film's "hooded villain".

He started asking questions: "Do you feel guilty? Have you ever lost consciousness?" Last, he asked Robinson to tell him her darkest secret. Her answer started playing back on a loop through her computer speakers. Robinson clicked on the exit box. She kept clicking, but nothing happened. Her phone buzzed with a text: "Where are you going? We're not finished yet..." At that point, Robinson was dumped into a conference call with other cinema goers who had just gone through the same experience. "We were all like,

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'What the fuck was that?' It was totally nuts."

Unwittingly, she had just participated in an emerging form of mainstream entertainment. Lance Weiler, the creator of Head Trauma, had programmed software to make all the payphones on the block ring. The preacher was an actor, a lead in the feature.

Based on the participants' responses to the automated phone calls, audio and video launched on the desktop screen. The exit box was a fake. Clicking on it sent that last text. For Weiler, a 41-year-old New Yorker, the experience "demonstrated the fluidity of an audience. After the movie ended, it followed people home."

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This is transmedia storytelling. Large studios and broadcasters, as well as independent filmmakers such as Weiler, are building fictional worlds that smash through their frames on to multiple platforms. Unlike quick promotional spin-offs, this new type of tie-in extends, rather than adapts, storylines. It tells various parts of the story using distinct media, exploiting the qualities unique to each platform. So when you watch a TV show, you might follow a sub-plot that spills on to the web, then read the dénouement in a graphic novel. Yes, writers have long created worlds that go beyond the page -- L Frank Baum did as much with his 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, whose story world he expanded into a musical and other books. But today's transmedia producers are planning for multiple platforms from the start. They design fictional universes that are consistent however the audience engages.

The trend is already reconfiguring the industry, affecting everything from how stories are made, down to titles on business cards. In April, the Producers Guild of America, which represents production staff in TV, film and online, ratified a new credit: transmedia producer, which codified these characteristics. Jeff Gomez, a videogame producer, was instrumental in pushing the credit: in 2000, after becoming excited by the multiplatform genre, he had left his job as an editor at Acclaim Entertainment to start Starlight Runner, a transmedia production company. After he successfully extended the Hot Wheels brand across videogames, TV and film in 2003, a string of Hollywood studios asked him to create multiplatform worlds for the likes of

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Pirates Of The Caribbean, Avatar and Tron 2. This side of the Atlantic, broadcasters are taking the lead, using transmedia to invigorate small-screen titles such as

Emmerdale and Doctor Who. In a world of multichoice TV, mobile and the web, competition for viewers has never been greater, and audience attention never more fragmented.

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That's why many content creators are betting that transmedia will focus it once again.

In 1998, The Blair Witch Project proved -- accidentally -- that even small-scale multimedia efforts could pack a hefty punch. Made with handheld video cameras and presented as a documentary, the film followed four fictional student filmmakers as they tracked the mythical Blair Witch in Burkittsville, Maryland. "It was improvised, so we developed this mythology to give to the actors," says Mike Monello, 41, one of the film's five coproducers, who now runs a transmedia marketing company in New York called Campfire. "But whenever we cut away [from the handheld footage] to give you information about it, the momentum of the movie started to die. We tested a long cut instead, and the response showed that people were grabbed by it, so we went with that. Then we had some clips shown on Bravo's Split Screen, and John Pierson, its presenter, played along. He said, 'So are the guys attached to the film pulling our leg, or is the Blair Witch something that we should be concerned about?'" Split Screen's message board flooded with chatter.

In June that year, excited by the buzz, the producers put the rest of the back-story online and wrote themselves into the narrative. Supposedly, the families of the missing students had asked Monello and his collaborators to compile the discovered footage. When the film was released in July 1999, they already had a hungry audience -- with minimal marketing spend. The result: wider distribution than they could ever have achieved with their tiny budget. "We didn't have access to film-festival programmers or distributors," Monello says. "But as we were saying, 'The film's going to open in New York, Chicago, LA', we had all these fans who were like, 'Well, when am I going to see it in Atlanta? Or Alabama?' All we could tell them was to call their local theatres and ask for it, which they did." Made for $25,000, it grossed $249 million worldwide.

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Although Blair Witch was transmedia-shaped, nobody was using the term. That came in late autumn 2002, when Henry Jenkins, a media professor at MIT, went to an Electronic Arts workshop held for Hollywood producers and game designers in Los Angeles. "There was enormous excitement there about the prospect of deeper collaboration," says the 52-year-old, whose work on convergence culture became a touchstone for transmedia theory. "They were groping towards a reimagining of what entertainment could do in an era of networked communications, but lacked a conceptual vocabulary. My job was to sum things up at the end of each brainstorm. So I tightened my own thinking." He wrote an essay,

Transmedia Storytelling, on the plane journey back. It was published in MIT's Technology Review in January 2003 and gave the movement a language.

As broadband-internet adoption started to hit TV ratings, the networks began to see the new digital platforms -- YouTube, MySpace, Habbo -- as potential tools for building audiences. In 2006, the NBC network used the new sci-fi drama Heroes as a testing ground. "The dotcom division of NBC had a mandate to push content on to the digital space, which happened to coincide perfectly with the launch of our show," says Tim Kring, the show's LA-based creator. "There was very little precedent for what we were doing, and for a long time we were able to indulge whatever ideas we had." From midway through season one, the story began to snake from the TV episodes to comics, through games and fake websites, expanding its borders at every turn. For example, says Kring, 52,"We had a character called Wireless, who could pick up wireless communications out of thin air. She was introduced online in a comic, and then she showed up as a character in the show, about 15 episodes into season one. In some ways having a character migrate from one platform to another is the holy grail of transmedia storytelling. It works on a story level for anybody who had just watched the TV show; but for people who had followed online, they understood this woman's backstory. So when she showed up they had a much deeper connection to her."

Meanwhile, in New York, Lance Weiler was planning Head Trauma. He didn't have much cash to burn (the film cost $126,000), but wanted an equally engaging experience. Weiler's answer? A pervasive game. "I started to experiment with it not being a film in traditional form -- how could I put people into the shoes of the protagonist? How could the story move from one experience to another in ways that created some degree of social interaction?"

In its limited US cinema release, Head Trauma consistently sold out. So Weiler planned his next project, a post-apocalyptic mystery called HiM (short for Hope is Missing), as transmedia from the outset. It launched in 2007 as a blog set up by a man to find his missing fiancée, Hope Wilcott; the quest became an alternate reality game. It proved popular: the blog attracted 2.5 million views. Weiler is now working on an augmented-reality app for Android phones which continues the story. And this autumn he'll shoot the HiM feature film with Ted Hope, producer of 21 Grams.

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Today, dedicated transmedia production houses are starting to win contracts from broadcasters and studios around the world. Los Angeles remains the biggest hub: Imagine, the multiple-Oscar-winning studio run by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, recently struck a deal with Blacklight Studios, a transmedia startup, to get first refusal on film rights to its projects.

Grazer says he signed Blacklight "before transmedia had penetrated Hollywood's consciousness, because it represents a new model, from both a creative and business standpoint." On the east coast, Jeff Gomez's Starlight Runner, and Fourth Wall Studios -- whose founders worked with Steven Spielberg and Microsoft to produce alternate reality games -- are now creating their own entertainment properties. Jim Stewartson, Fourth Wall's president, aims "to take transmedia to the masses.

Her office in BBC Television Centre in west London is plastered with screen-grabs from The Adventure Games, a new Doctor Who video game. Still, Jaye is optimistic -- not least when it comes to the bottom line. "For the two-hour drama you get in every Adventure Game, it's a fraction of the cost of television drama. And we're looking for an increase in visitors to the website -- a significant increase." But it's not just that. Jaye claims it's a worthwhile creative experiment in itself. "It's very much about innovation in storytelling, and using gameplay to reimagine stories."

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She points to the success of E20, a web series that offered a transmedia take on EastEnders. At the end of each episode of the soap, viewers were directed to online videos varying from three to 16 minutes in length which explored the storylines of peripheral, younger characters. Its four leads debuted in the TV show before going on to star in the web series.

E20 garnered 3.3 million viewers in the two weeks it ran, securing the second series announced in April. "I realised, 'My God, the audience really want this,'" says Jaye.

Channel 4 sees transmedia as key to reaching audiences with its factual and educational programming. "We're commissioning for attention, not platform," says Matt Locke, who is responsible for the channel's cross-platform strategy -- and he wants to find viewers wherever they are. The channel's younger audience, in particular, is engaging online: 1066, a warfare-strategy web game commissioned alongside a history documentary of the same name, has been played 16 million times, for an average of 20 minutes per session, since May 2009.

Transmedia has blurred the divisions within organisations: Locke says that he stopped making those distinctions long ago (he insists that his commissioning team is "platform agnostic"). And at the BBC, for example, multiplatform producers are embedded with the traditional production teams of each show; television writers work alongside games developers. Even the distinction between platforms may disappear as audiences increasingly engage with separate platforms simultaneously. The market-research firm Nielsen estimates that in December 2009, US viewers spent an average of three hours and 30 minutes watching TV while also using the internet. That's nearly an hour longer than a year earlier. As new technology such as tablet devices built for sofa surfing and web-enabled TV become ubiquitous, they will make consuming transmedia content more natural.

Nor is the revolution confined to the living room: its pioneers are excited by the new wave of mobile-web apps, which will bring the transmedia experience to wherever the audience is. "The ability to have a device which knows where you are and who all your friends are gives us a tremendous opportunity to tell stories in the real world," says Kring. "And the rise of augmented reality is going to be fantastic: imagine seeing someone's face appear on your mobile screen in a three-dimensional way, telling you what to do next or giving you some piece of the story." He will experiment with both in his next project, Conspiracy For Good.

For Gomez, storytellers who embrace these possibilities will define pop culture. So what will happen when transmedia's fledgling audience comes of age? He gets whimsical. "We're going to see our transmedia Mozart. We are going to see visionaries who understand the value of each media platform as if it's a separate musical instrument, who'll create symphonic narratives which leverage each of these multimedia platforms in a way that will create something we haven't encountered yet. "And it's going to be magnificent."